


A Natural History of the Piano

by cyanocorax



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Incest, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-22
Updated: 2012-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 22:36:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/324919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanocorax/pseuds/cyanocorax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Mycroft learnt to play the piano when he was four, but lost interest in the instrument after only a few months. Everything was too obvious, too spelled out. The technicalities of it all were far more worthy of attention— the physics. Equal temperament, for instance: the principle that in order to accommodate all twenty-four major and minor keys, no one key will ever be in tune; there will always be breaks between the pitches, slight imbalance in the sound. The harmonies will never be perfect, but rather settle, like itches, beneath one’s aural consciousness, nagging, persisting, the price one pays for order.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Natural History of the Piano

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sorry but also i'm not.................? gosh is there like a rule that you shouldn't remix your own fic
> 
> whatever this is kind of a v.2.0 of 'sonata form' let's just put that out there

When questioned by the neighbors’ sons as to why his family never kept any pets, Mycroft Holmes occasionally deigned to lift his head from his book, curl his eyebrows, and reply, “My brother is trouble enough, thank you.”

The books tended to be volumnous and factual— a biography of Winston Churchill, perhaps, or Herodotus’ _Histories_. His father’s copies, so he kept the pages crisp, clean, and unblemished.

He’d been telling the truth when it came to Sherlock. Like a housecat, the boy would leave the house at sunrise and return come dark with all array of macabre trophies in his pockets. Bleached bones, (generally vertebrae, but once there had been a mouse skull that had aroused a burst of rattling enthusiasm,) feathers, fascinating insects trapped in jars. He would be terribly fond of them for perhaps all of an hour, and go into his room to further dessicate them down to the smallest minutiae, before descending the staircase like Charles Darwin himself, fresh with discovery. 

Mycroft indulged his brother’s interests, but grudgingly. He himself was sixteen, too old for such nonsense, and saw no appeal in spending all the day’s hours scrambling through the woods, working up a sweat, all to find the decayed remnants of an _Apodemus sylvaticus_. But in the hot summer evenings, he allowed himself to be led into Sherlock’s cluttered bedroom, and sat upon the stained rug, watching his brother’s small, pale hands move over leaves, twigs, pebbles. “I found the body here,” he said, eyes alight, “but there were scuffle marks as far as ten feet away— which means—”

“The hawk missed on the first try, yes,” Mycroft yawned. Sherlock snapped his head up, wild curls bouncing, irritated. In moments such as those, the boy was more birdlike than cat. The little veins in his neck fluttered and the whole of him seemed to quiver.

“There’s no point in telling you anything, is there?” he groused, gathering up his little crime scene, setting it aside. “Very well, then-- go away.” The last phrase was spat out like a poison.

Mycroft got to his feet. He was suddenly very tired. Sherlock had that capability.

When he returned to the room some hours later, the clocks read three in the morning and Sherlock was fast asleep on the floor, surrounded by evidence, the remnants of a happening he had not witnessed but was attempting to see. Part of Mycroft empathized— minds such as theirs were not meant to dedicate themselves to the superficial. 

He left Sherlock where he lay. He had not touched his brother since he was an infant, and some self-imposed rules, one does not break.

-

Mycroft learnt to play the piano when he was four, but lost interest in the instrument after only a few months. Everything was too obvious, too spelled out. The technicalities of it all were far more worthy of attention— the physics. Equal temperament, for instance: the principle that in order to accommodate all twenty-four major and minor keys, no one key will ever be in tune; there will always be breaks between the pitches, slight imbalance in the sound. The harmonies will never be perfect, but rather settle, like itches, beneath one’s aural consciousness, nagging, persisting, the price one pays for order.

So is the art of compromise.

- 

When Sherlock was sixteen, he looked as if he had stepped out of a Caravaggio, so divinely structured were his features. Dark, unruly hair, which grew long and swept into his eyes, and skin as marble. When he flushed, it appeared positively indecent. 

Mycroft was home, visiting. Their mother puttered about the house, smelling of lavender, absent-minded and distant; their father, unchanged, remained in the darkness of his study, writing the memoirs he would never publish and composing hateful letters he would never send.

Sherlock went in and out of the rooms, ghost-like, gangly, silent. He was more reserved with his words those days, saving them for the dinner table, where he would carelessly spout something inconvenient about Mycroft’s eating habits away from home, or criticize the cooking. He refused to talk _with_ people, preferring to talk at them until they returned fire, or left, or both, one after the other. 

His hands moved as he spoke. Pale and thin, like the rest of him. The little muscles and blue veins on the undersides of his wrists flexing and stretching. Mycroft suddenly realized he’d forgotten to close his mouth midway through chewing another mouthful of his mother’s (admittedly dry) chicken, and did so, quickly. His teeth made a little ‘clack’. 

Sherlock stopped, suddenly, out of breath, pink and pleased, and fixed his eyes upon Mycroft’s. The room felt too quiet.

Their mother stood. “Shall I fetch the dessert then?” she said, smiling, the corners of her eyes crooked with anxiety.

That night, Mycroft did not sleep. He lay awake in his old bedroom, eyes skitting over the titles of his father’s relocated books, their cracking spines illuminated by slits of moonlight, trying and succeeding at remembering the opening paragraph of each one. He did this until he heard a little noise from downstairs, a quiet twanging sound that despite its softness managed to crawl through the beams and floorboords of the house, like a worm.

He rose, barefooted, and made his way down the steps and into the sitting room, where Sherlock was bent over the open piano, a cigarette between his lips. His hands were settled on the cold, metal strings, and occasionally, one long, white finger would crook, tense, and pluck.

 _Brum._  

“There you are,” Sherlock said, puffing once, twice. The smoke hovered around him. He smiled when Mycroft moved closer, an insidious little curl of rosy flesh. “Are you going to tell on me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Mycroft reached out then, took the cigarette from Sherlock’s mouth. It was cheap, terrible; the taste pricked at the inside of him, not like those warm cigars he’d been introduced to at school. But it suited his brother, so he handed it back.

Sherlock smoked with expert ease. The action became him. He exhaled each mouthful with an elegance that bordered on artful, like breathing fire. Absentmindedly, he dragged his fingertips across the piano strings, slowly at first, until he reached the upper register and raised his hand so he was using the nail of his forefinger. 

 _Ping, ping, ping ping plin—k_. “Ach! Damn—”

 Even in the dark, Mycroft could see a sticky wetness on the string, and he had heard the snag. Sherlock had retreated, and was now settled against the curve of the piano’s body, inspecting his finger.

The cigarette lay on the ground, burning a hole in the rug. Mycroft knelt and picked it up, then held its glowing tip to Sherlock’s hand. “Show me,” he said. The words came out oddly cold. 

“Stop, leave it alone.”

Almost sixteen years since he’d last laid hand on his brother. The light coming in through the open curtains made Sherlock’s skin glow, translucent, and the blood from his split nail was coming out thick and dark, and the whole of him was a cool, humming thing. Mycroft let the little stub of cigarette drop once more, disregarding the ash he scattered all over his pyjamas, and gripped his brother’s wrist.

“Leave it,” Sherlock said again.

Mycroft inspected the injury. The blood had dribbled all the way down to the third knuckle in one long, meandering streak, very red against the white. Very inviting. Very out of place. For one of the few times in his young life, Mycroft Holmes did not pause to think. He raised Sherlock’s stiff, unyielding hand, and took the whole of his brother’s forefinger into his mouth.

Sherlock was silent through all of this. He worked at his lower lip with his teeth, yes, and his eyes were wide and dark, but he did not say a word. Mycroft sucked until he could not taste the sweet, rusty blood any longer, cheeks in, teeth pressing down just enough to leave marks. The split nail was digging into the roof of his mouth. His pulse was pounding in his ears. Suddenly, he was alive with all sorts of _sensations_.

He slipped Sherlock’s finger out with a little ‘pop’, but did not let go, not yet, instead choosing to leave his thumb pressed against the bottom of that slender little wrist, feeling a steady beat which was already delivering more blood to the wound. When he did at last relinquish his grip, it was gently. 

They were still for a moment. Sherlock’s breath came out in hisses and huffs. He was red again, from his cheeks to his ears.

“Go to bed,” Mycroft whispered, not too surprised when he found himself obeyed without question.

He watched the shadow of his brother move up the staircase in total silence, without even a creak in the floorboards, and it felt like victory.

-

At school he would sometimes be asked to talk about Sherlock, in the same tones his neighbors had asked about his lack of pets. He would be bland then, and use the simplest of adjectives, such as “incorrigible,” or “stubborn,” or, if he were in a more loquacious mood, whole phrases. “Self-destructive to the point of _creativity_ ” was a well-worn favorite.

He did not compare Sherlock to the skewed lengths of piano strings, to the irritating knowledge all those who understand sound must carry, to the little secret buried beneath every soaring chord or half-risen melody: that it is wrong, that it is unhinged, that it is an exchange for something that could have been sublime. 

- 

Sherlock was twenty, coughing beneath the covers. Even coming out of delirium, he managed an odd magnetism. His hollowed out cheeks remained flush and his hands— always the hands— trembled, cold and moist.

Outside, the rain came down in buckets. Mycroft, seated on the bed, read his newspaper. “Drink your tea,” he said, to which Sherlock simply grunted and rolled over, pulling at the sheets. A thin layer of perspiration covered his brow. He looked nine once more, fresh from the wood, wild, rampant.

“I need to go,” he croaked.

“Impossible.”

Sherlock rose, high enough that Mycroft’s line of vision settled directly on the hollow beneath his throat. “You’ve cured me,” he said. Something about him seemed impossibly brittle. “Now let me leave.”

“You’re far from healthy.”

“As if that were ever your real concern," came out, scoffed. "You’re doing this to punish me, all because you don’t _approve_.”

 It was true. He had never been particularly pleased with Sherlock’s choices. Playing detective was an amusing distraction when he was a boy, but now, now they were men, now there was the world to think of. Mycroft licked his lips. He was suddenly very impatient. “And why do you care, little brother, what I do and do not approve of?” he said.

And Sherlock blinked, only half-sober. They were, momentarily, children, a memory, sat upon the ground, bones and other remains all about them. “You idiot,” Sherlock said, crouching, eyebrows doing a strange crawl, and Mycroft realized, with a little thrill, that it had always been about him, impressing _him_ , proving to _him_. “You self-centered old--”

Mycroft was tempted, sorely tempted, to wrap his hands around the pale, vibrating neck before him, and simply--

He snapped the newspaper and flipped the page, viewing from the corner of his eye the blurred image of Sherlock collapsing back onto the mattress, gasping like a fish out of water. Gulping for air. Violent in his uprising.

He did not love his brother, not in that moment. Some lies, one never told. 


End file.
